The Medicine Line

Born of encounters between Indigenous women and Euro-American men in the first decades of the nineteenth century, the Plains Metis people occupied contentious geographic and cultural spaces. Living in a disputed area of the northern Plains inhabited by various Indigenous nations and claimed by both the United States and Great Britain, the Metis emerged as a people with distinctive styles of speech, dress, and religious practice, and occupational identities forged in the intense rivalries of the fur and provisions trade. Michel Hogue explores how, as fur trade societies waned and as state officials looked to establish clear lines separating the United States from Canada and Indians from non-Indians, these communities of mixed Indigenous and European ancestry were profoundly affected by the efforts of nation-states to divide and absorb the North American West. Grounded in extensive research in U.S. and Canadian archives, Hogue's account recenters historical discussions that have typically been confined within national boundaries and illuminates how Plains Indigenous peoples like the Metis were at the center of both the unexpected accommodations and the hidden history of violence that made the "world's longest undefended border."

Along the border between Montana and Saskatchewan lies one hundred miles of hard and desolate terrain, a remote place where Native and new American nations came together in a contest for land, wealth, and survival. Following explorers Lewis and Clark and Alexander Mackenzie, both Americans and Canadians launched the process of empire along the 49th parallel, disrupting the lives of Native peoples who began to traverse this imaginary line in search of refuge. In this evocative and beautifully rendered portrait, Beth LaDow recreates the unstable world along this harsh frontier, capturing the complex history of a borderland known as "the medicine line" to the Indians who lived there. When Sitting Bull crossed the boundary for the last time in 1881, weary of pursuit by the U.S. cavalry and the constant threat of starvation, the region opened up to railroad men and settlers, determined to make a living. But the unforgiving landscape would resist repeated attempts to subdue it, from the schemes of powerful railroad magnate James J. Hill, to the exploits of Canadian Mountie James Walsh, to the misguided dreams of ranchers and homesteaders, whose difficult existence is best captured in Wallace Stegner's plaintive accounts of a boyhood spent in this stark place. Drawing on little-known diaries, letters, and memories, as well as interviews with the descendants of settlers and native peoples, The Medicine Line reveals how national interests were transformed by the powerful alchemy of mingling peoples and the place they shared. With a historian's insight and a storyteller's gift, LaDow questions some of our deepest assumptions about a nationalist frontier past and finds in this least-known place a new historical and emotional heart-land of the North American West. A colorful history of the most desolate terrain in America, one hundred miles between Canada & Montana, where three nations fought over land, wealth, & ultimately survival

The border between Canada and the United States- the longest undefended border in the world-was laid out in many stages over more than a century, but the biggest part of the job was the long, (mostly) straight line across the prairies. On September 18, 1872, a full five years after confederation, two large teams of army surveyors-one from each country-met at the Red River on the Manitoba-Minnesota border. They were there to fix, for the first time, the precise location of the 49th Parallel between the swampy shores of the Lake of the Woods-where the border had an awkward, keyhole-shaped notch that was the source of much tension-and the summit of the continental divide in the Rockies. Over the next two years, the members of the International Boundary Commission went about the business of surveying, mapping and placing markers across nearly 900 miles of unforgiving territory. Through the work of its brilliant naturalists, the Commission created the first accurate descriptions of what was still largely terra incognita. In drawing the Medicine Line across the High Plains, the Boundary Commission defined the final shape of a new nation and ended, once and for all, the old American dream of Manifest Destiny.

The epic confrontation between Sitting Bull and the North-West Mounted Police.

For almost three decades, Edward Curtis photographed the First Peoples of the North American West and studied their cultures. As part of his fieldwork, he cruised the Pacific Northwest coast and ventured into the lands of the Blackfoot Confederacy, both north and south of the Medicine Line. Alarmed that the traditional Aboriginal ways of life seemed in danger of disappearing forever, Curtis made an incredible effort to capture the daily routines, character and dignity of First Peoples through photography and audio recordings. Against seemingly insurmountable odds and at substantial personal and financial sacrifice, he completed the 20-volume masterpiece The North American Indian, deemed “the most gigantic undertaking in the making of books since the King James edition of the Bible” by the New York Herald. With more than 150 photographs, Edward S. Curtis Above the Medicine Line is both a compelling narrative that sheds new light on the Curtis mystique and a fascinating overview of many of the First Peoples he studied a century ago.

James Morrow Walsh can rightfully be called the original Mountie. In late 1873 he led the first troop of scarlet-coated policemen toward the great Canadian prairie. In the summer of 1875 he was assigned to construct Fort Walsh in the Cypress Hills above the Canada-U.S. border. Below the border, or medicine line as the Sioux Nation knew it, 15,000 Native Americans were drawn a year later to the camp of Sitting Bull on the Little Bighorn River. By 1877, newspaper headlines from Chicago to New York tweaked the curiosity of millions by referring to Walsh as "Sitting Bull's Boss." The years leading up to those headlines and the times that followed were the most dramatic era in the history of the west.

Most of us want and expect medicine’s miracles to extend our lives. In today’s aging society, however, the line between life-giving therapies and too much treatment is hard to see—it’s being obscured by a perfect storm created by the pharmaceutical and biomedical industries, along with insurance companies. In Ordinary Medicine Sharon R. Kaufman investigates what drives that storm’s “more is better” approach to medicine: a nearly invisible chain of social, economic, and bureaucratic forces that has made once-extraordinary treatments seem ordinary, necessary, and desirable. Since 2002 Kaufman has listened to hundreds of older patients, their physicians and family members express their hopes, fears, and reasoning as they faced the line between enough and too much intervention. Their stories anchor Ordinary Medicine. Today’s medicine, Kaufman contends, shapes nearly every American’s experience of growing older, and ultimately medicine is undermining its own ability to function as a social good. Kaufman’s careful mapping of the sources of our health care dilemmas should make it far easier to rethink and renew medicine’s goals.

The Last Sovereigns is the story of how Sioux chief Sitting Bull resisted the white man’s ways as a last best hope for the survival of an indigenous way of life on the Great Plains—a nomadic life based on buffalo and indigenous plants scattered across the Sioux’s historical territories that were sacred to him and his people. Robert M. Utley explores the final four years of Sitting Bull’s life of freedom, from 1877 to 1881. To escape American vengeance for his assumed role in the annihilation of Gen. George Armstrong Custer’s command at the Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull led his Hunkpapa following into Canada. There he and his people interacted with the North-West Mounted Police, in particular Maj. James M. Walsh. The Mounties welcomed the Lakota and permitted them to remain if they promised to abide by the laws and rules of Queen Victoria, the White Mother. But the Canadian government wanted the Indians to return to their homeland and the police made every effort to persuade them to leave. They were aided by the diminishing herds of buffalo on which the Indians relied for sustenance and by the aggressions of Canadian Native groups that also relied on the buffalo. Sitting Bull and his people endured hostility, tragedy, heartache, indecision, uncertainty, and starvation and responded with stubborn resistance to the loss of their freedom and way of life. In the end, starvation doomed their sovereignty. This is their story.